Some photographs arrive easily. You pull up, set the tripod, expose the film, and leave. Hemet Fire Station Number Three was not one of those photographs. It took me several separate visits — scouting trips and shooting days — before I finally came away with a frame I was satisfied with. What began as a simple architectural study of a modest civic building became a quiet obsession, a lesson in patience, light, and the stubborn unpredictability of real-world locations.
I first became interested in Hemet Fire Station Number Three because of its honest, unassuming character. There is nothing ornate about it. It is a simple wood-panel structure with a brick base. It has a two-bay garage and a small attached home-station for the firefighters.
I use a viewfinder app on my phone to pre-visualize compositions and print them out before committing to a location. On my first scouting visit to Hemet Fire Station Number Three, I walked the perimeter thoroughly, checking angles from the sidewalk and from across the street. The panoramic 6×17 format I had in mind for this project demands a carefully considered horizontal composition, and a small shift in position can dramatically change the frame.
The big tree in front of the station was the first challenge. Beautiful as it was, it threw a sprawling shadow across the forecourt and the home section for most of the morning, and on the garage in the afternoon. It also blocked most of the station, so a direct shot from across the street was not going to work. After waiting a few days for the sun to come out, I returned for another scouting visit at noon and confirmed what I had suspected: the shadow situation was clean only around solar noon. I then tried an angle closer to the building, off to the right, to get a view inside the tree. The angle felt better and had some dimension. Now I had a composition and knew how much rise I would need to keep the lines straight. I just needed to wait until noon on a sunny day to come back and shoot.
The next complication at Hemet Fire Station Number Three was the apparatus bays themselves. A fire station is a working building, and fire trucks come and go. On two of my actual shooting attempts, one of the large apparatus doors was open, and a truck was partially visible, cutting into the clean geometry I needed for the composition and letting too much light in from the rear of the station. I simply had to wait. That is the nature of location work — the building is not posing for you, and the world does not pause for your camera.
On my final successful visit to Hemet Fire Station Number Three, I had a clean window of perhaps a few minutes with no vehicles in the frame. I used every one of them to set up, compose my pre-planned frame, set the rise, focus, and shoot. Funny enough, when I was done, the bay door opened for the engine to leave on a call. I smiled and gave a thumbs-up to the firefighters as they were leaving.
For this shot, I used Kodak Portra 160, my Chamonix 5×7 field camera, a Dayi 6×17 roll-film back, and a Nikkor 90mm f/4.5 SW lens. In the final image, Fire Station Number Three is captured in ideal conditions, with clear light, flags raised, and an unobstructed foreground. In the distance, the valley floor opens up, and the mountains sit quietly behind. It is a simple picture of a simple building. I like it. It also looks great in black and white.
The process of large-format shooting requires you to earn your photographs. Hemet Fire Station Number Three gave me exactly the kind of challenge that keeps me coming back to this way of working — and the kind of satisfaction, when it finally comes together, that no other photographic method quite replicates.
Hemet Fire Station Number Three
| Tag Name | Data |
|---|---|
| Title | Hemet Fire Station Number Three |
| Image Description | Hemet Fire Station Number Three, situated at 4110 W. Devonshire Avenue, Hemet, CA, serves as one of the emergency response facilities for Hemet. |
| Keywords | 6x17, 6x17 film, film scan, fire station, hemet, hemet california, kodak portra 160, panorama |
| Copyright | Copyright ExpertPhoto.com All Rights Reserved |
| Artist | ExpertPhoto.com |
| Make | Chamonix |
| Camera Model Name | Chamonix 57Fs-2 |
| Lens Model | Nikkor-SW 90mm f/4.5 |
| Focal Length | 90.00mm |
| Focal Length In 35mm Format | 19.00mm |
| Shutter Speed Value | 1/60 second |
| Aperture Value | 20.00 |
| ISO | 160 |
| Date/Time Original | Sunday February 22, 2026 12:30pm |
| City | Hemet |
| State | California |
| Country | United States |
| GPS Altitude | 460 meters (1509.2 feet) above sea level |
| GPS Latitude | 33.7511884266703 |
| GPS Longitude | -117.014926883406 |
| Map | Google Map Link |